Prakash Govindan is the co-founder and CEO of Gradiant, the water industry's first unicorn, valued above $1 billion. Raised in Chennai during monsoon failures that dried up his family's taps, he turned a childhood of hauling buckets into a PhD at MIT and a company that now renews billions of liters of industrial water a day for clients in semiconductors, pharma, food and beverage, and mining. He co-invented Gradiant's flagship Carrier Gas Extraction technology, holds more than 100 patents, and helped bring the TIME Best Invention 'ForeverGone' PFAS-destruction system to market. A devoted bhakti yogi who has read the Bhagavad Gita some fifty times, he runs one of the fastest-growing water companies on earth while preaching egoless leadership.
Aditya Vishwanath is the co-founder and CEO of Inspirit, a Palo Alto edtech company that brings virtual and augmented reality into middle and high school STEM classrooms. A Georgia Tech computer scientist turned Stanford learning-sciences PhD, he built Inspirit to be the bridge between cutting-edge academic research and the everyday teacher. Before Inspirit he co-founded MakerGhat, a network of makerspaces for youth in low-income Mumbai neighborhoods. He is a Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Schmidt Futures Fellow, Ashoka Fellow, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in education.
Umesh Sachdev is the CEO and co-founder of Uniphore, a Palo Alto-based business AI company he started in Chennai in 2008 with college friend Ravi Saraogi. What began as a multilingual speech recognition startup incubated at IIT Madras has grown into one of the largest AI-native enterprise SaaS companies in the world, serving over 2,500 customers and approaching $1 billion in bookings. In October 2025 Uniphore closed a $260 million Series F co-led by NVIDIA, AMD, Snowflake and Databricks.
Rajiv Ramanan is the Co-Founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Spendflo, an AI-native procurement platform that helps fast-growing companies bring structure, visibility, and control to how they buy and manage software vendors. A Chennai native now based in San Francisco, Rajiv spent years at Freshworks building partner ecosystems and working with over 5,000 vendors before co-founding Spendflo in 2021 alongside Siddharth Sridharan and Ajay Vardhan. Under his GTM leadership, Spendflo has raised $15.9M in total funding, grown to 140 employees, and manages over $100M in SaaS expenditure for customers—delivering an average 23% reduction in software spend.
Vignesh Girishankar is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Rocketlane, a San Francisco-based professional services automation platform that has raised $105M in total funding. Before Rocketlane, he co-founded Konotor (acquired by Freshworks in 2015), where he transformed an in-app messaging tool into FreshChat, scaling it to $13M ARR. Based in Chennai, India, Vignesh is known for his rigorous customer discovery approach - conducting 80+ interviews spanning 200+ hours before writing a line of code - and for building category-defining enterprise software from India without relocating to Silicon Valley.